The Tennessean published Guy Barash’s recent op-ed discussing the importance of music publishers ensuring the quality of their metadata for compatibility with all global digital distribution standards.

Now that the U.S. Copyright Office has designated the NMPA, NSAI, and SONA-backed Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) to begin implementation of the Music Modernization Act (MMA), the time has come for the music publishing industry to get its act together regarding data.

…Currently, publishing data is spread across multiple databases, each with a different structure, making cross-compatibility a major headache. In addition, many publishers do not have data on the various recordings of their compositions, and vice versa at record labels. Further, the quality of existing data leaves much to be desired. For example, one of my clients kept track of royalty payments by putting symbols after the writer’s name, or even worse, creating duplicates.

The problems these techniques cause are too numerous to mention, including missed payments to songwriters, lack of transparency, an inability to audit payments, and cluttered databases that are difficult to sort through and understand.